At the time Humberside police — such as Detective Chief Inspector Mark Oliver in a press conference here — really went to town on the perceived menace of "M-Cat" or mephedrone and the media eagerly reported the concerns. Quite properly, DCI Oliver says he must wait for the toxicology. But then in the next breath it becomes perfectly clear he suspects mephedrone is behind the deaths. It seems a classic instance of police over-reaching themselves.

Anyway, the Labour government hastily made mephedrone into a Class B drug — with severe penalties for sale or use — on the basis of little more than a few unsubstantiated scare stories about how lethal it was. And, all the while, as David Nutt points out, good old alcohol kills one young person every day just through poisoning, let alone accidents etc.

Professor Nutt says lesson number one that needs to be learnt from this "debacle" is "that the police should not make pronouncements and certainly not hold press conferences on mere conjecture." Second, "the media should wait for evidence and allow the scientific process to take place before claiming harms of new legal highs." And third: that the government should have the courage to let the truth drive policy. Some hope, you may think. Lastly, he says:

The message must be conveyed to anyone who drinks and takes drugs that alcohol itself is very toxic (killing by acute poisoning, hundreds of young people each year through stopping breathing) and these actions are magnified when in combination with other drugs that lower breathing. If you do consider taking drugs whilst drunk then avoid at all costs other sedative drugs such as opioids and GHB/GBL.

One newspaper, as it happens, did not dive headlong into the mindless and ovine mephedrone hysteria: the Telegraph. This newspaper ran my article "Let's be honest about 'party drugs'". And Dr Max Pemberton even tried the stuff, all in the good cause of informing the reader: his article was titled "I took mephedrone and I liked it".

The rushed and intemperate response to mephedrone proved that, in our age, political expediency, and the need to pacify shrill and unreflective sections of the media, trump science and reason. Let us hope that, with a new government, this will change.